Nobody’s judging you if you unwind with a glass of wine or enjoy a cold one during the game. But binge drinking is now linked to insulin resistance. So it may be worth your while to pay attention to the study published in Science Translational Medicine.

Binge drinking causes insulin resistance, which increases the risk of Type 2 diabetes, The researchers at the Diabetes Obesity and Metabolism Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. peformed the study to see how overconsumption of alcohol affects the body’s ability to remain in a normal range of blood glucose.

The study show that binge drinking induces systemic insulin resistance The researchers discovered that alcohol disrupts insulin-receptor signaling by causing inflammation in a specific area of the brain.

A leading author of the study commented on the consequences of repeat offenders of adult beverages. “Someone who regularly binge drinks even once a week, over many years, may remain in an insulin resistant state for an extended period of time, potentially years” .

In this study, researchers treated [rats] with alcohol for three consecutive days to simulate human binge drinking. A control group received the same amount of calories in non-alcohol foods. Once alcohol was no longer detectable in blood, glucose metabolism was observed. The alcohol consumption group had higher blood concentrations of insulin than the control group.

The presence of high plasma insulin is a telltale sign of metabolic syndrome. The metabolic syndrome increases the risk for T2D.

It had been thought that binge drinking is a personality trait that leads one to binge eating. For the first time, researchers are able to show that binge drinking induces insulin resistance directly and can occur independent of differences in calorie consumption.

So now it’s a proven fact: drinking too much, too often, can lead to stupid behavior in your body’s response to insulin. This puts a new spin on “you are what you drink”. Don’t be a lush who responds slowly to insulin.